The story of Zheng Zhenxiang and Lady Fu Hao

16 May 1976 – a warm sunny day as Zheng was to recall – began as a typical day on site and ended with a remarkable discovery. Zheng Zhenxiang was leading an archaeological team at Yinxu, Anyang in China looking for evidence of tombs from the Shang Dynasty period. This was a very difficult and dangerous time to be an archaeologist in China. Zheng had been the only woman in the archaeological department at Peking University and she must have struggled to gain experience in the field and been worried about her position as an academic while she was at university. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China from 1966 to 1976 had led to the persecution of intellectuals, and the Red Guard had looked to eradicate the Four Olds: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. This led to many sites of antiquity being vandalised, and excavations were disapproved of. By 1976 no planned excavations were allowed but Zheng and her team were able to do small-scale digs for relatively short periods of time if there was general construction work going on. Time was running out for this particular dig. Zheng’s colleagues did not believe that there were any significant burial sites close to the palace area where they were working but Zheng was not deterred. Her determination was rewarded...